discovery

Ethan Field and Ron Campbell were hiking off-trail in Oregon's Columbia Gorge last week when something shiny caught their eye. Bending over, they discovered an old camera that was mostly covered by rocks, dirt, and vegetation.

Lenticular prints use an array of lenses to cause an image to change before your eyes as you view them from different angles. Scientists have now figured out how to do a "changing photo" trick without lenses using an inkjet printer and metallic sheets.

A new patent filed by Facebook suggests that the social networking giant is working on giving user cameras a unique digital fingerprint. Looking for ways to identify fraudulent accounts and evermore establish what connections you may have with others, the new technology means that your future photographs will be tracked at levels previously unimaginable. For photographers, however, it may be an excellent way to prove that you truly own an image.

Finding the perfect location for a photoshoot can be tricky and is even more of a challenge if you're constantly looking for new spots to shoot. Scoutt is an interactive mapping service crowdsourced by photographers to scout out interesting locations around the world for fellow shooters.

This group photo from 1887 is reportedly the first photo ever found of Vincent Van Gogh after he became an artist. If experts are correct, then the man third from the left (and smoking a pipe) is the legendary artist himself.

1,250 glass negatives from between 1910 and 1925 were recently found in the archives of the Swiss photo agency Keystone. After some thorough research work, it was concluded that the photos formed an important chapter of Swiss photographic history: they were shot by photographer Jules Decrauzat, widely considered now to be the first sports photographer and first major photojournalist in the history of Switzerland.

Peter Fordham was a British photographer best-known for his music work in the 1970s. If you own a copy of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, his second solo album, you’ll be familiar with his work. Fordham was the photographer who took the picture of Lennon, sat at his white piano with a pair of headphones on, at Lennon’s Tittenhurst Park home where the 1971 album was recorded. It’s a classic of rock music photography, Lennon singing into a hard black mic set against a stark white room, and was included as a fold-out poster in the album.

A photographer's notebook from over a century ago has been discovered in Antarctica. It belonged to British explorer and photographer George Murray Levick, who was part of Robert Falcon Scott's last expedition to the continent from 1910 to 1913.

Two hundred million images... PhotoShelter has amassed over 200M images from over 80,000 photographers in the almost a decade since they burst onto the scene. And today they unveil a new way for those 80,000 photographers to share those 200M+ images with fans that might not even know they exist yet.

It's called Lattice, and maybe the simplest way we could describe it is Pinterest for Professional Photographers, Curators, and Photography Lovers.

Photo sharing and portfolio building sites, if you'll allow us a cliché, are a dime a dozen. Once you strip away the marketing speak they act in much the same way, with the differences are few and great work is often buried under an avalanche of work that's just 'okay.'

It takes a lot, in other words, to really break the mold -- which is what makes the August platform/app such a breath of fresh photo sharing air. Part respectable art gallery, part photo sharing and discovery platform, it offers a unique and incredibly fulfilling experience for both creators and consumers.

In what is a rare and rather historical event, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured a fuzzy image of what scientists believe is a new moon forming from the particle rings surrounding the planet.

Almost one hundred years after a group of explorers set out across the frozen landscape of Antarctica to set up supply depots for famed explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, a box of 22 never-before-seen exposed but unprocessed negatives taken by the group's photographer has been unearthed in one of those shacks, preserved in a block of ice.

Are you ready for this? An international team of researchers have developed the world's first telescopic contact lens -- a 1.17mm thick pair of contact lenses that, when you want them to, will magnify your vision by 2.8x.

More than 75 years ago, aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared not far from the completion of her record-breaking attempt to circumnavigate the Earth at the equator. The wreckage of her plane was never found, and many believe that what's left of that wreckage is still somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.

Another theory, however, is that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan made an emergency landing on the reef surrounding the yet uninhabited island known as Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro). And some recently found aerial negatives of that island might hold to key to proving this theory right.

NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery’s first launch was back on August 30th, 1984 from …

Hyperspectral cameras are those that can capture information in the electromagnetic spectrum, far beyond what the human eye — …

What if the battery in your camera could be charged in the same amount of time it takes to microwave a cup of instant noodles? It sounds crazy, but that's what appears to be headed our way.

Researchers at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea have figured out a way to drastically cut down the time it takes to recharge a lithium-ion battery -- the same kind found in most digital cameras.

California-based entomologist Shaun Winterton was browsing Flickr back in May 2011, when he discovered a new species of insect.

That's right: he made a scientific discovery by simply looking at pictures online.

It might not be very applicable to the vast majority of photographers, but NASA astronaut Captain Alan Pointdexter has written up a fascinating article over on Luminous Landscape in which he shares advice about doing photography in space. Taking photos on the ground is one thing, but imagine using not just the sun, but the earth itself as a source of light.

After damaging the pellicle mirror in his Sony A55 with cleaning fluid, a guy named Dario decided to look …

On a rainy day recently, light painting photographer Jeremy Jackson was …

MIT scientists have discovered that graphene, a material consisting of one-atom thick sheets …

Researchers in Australia are working on developing a thin piezoelectric film that can …

A Polish collector claims he's found an extremely rare daguerrotype of composer and pianist Frédéric Chopin, taken in his final repose in 1849.

If the image is authentic, it would be one of only three photographs of the composer, including the image of him alive in 1846, above. And it would be the only known original daguerrotype in existence -- all other images are duplicates.

We’re lucky that cameras and camcorders can be used during flights, or we wouldn’t have this amazing view of …

Scientists at Stanford have found that looking at pictures of loved ones can reduce pain. The study involved performing …